I See What You Meme

Sometimes I dream of you ... You are a baby. We cuddle. You coo. I can smell your sweet breath.  Our hearts beat as one. Sometimes I dream of you... You are a cancer warrior. Bald as a cue ball. Spunky and strong. I fight for you to live.  I struggle, helplessly, as I watch you die. Sometimes I dream of you... You are a child who has never known cancer. Your blond curls bounce in the breeze.  Your brown eyes penetrate my soul.  You speak with a wisdom far beyond your years.  Sometimes I dream of you... You are older. Or younger. It is not you...and yet it is.  Your hair and eyes are of a different hue.  And yet I know that it is you. Sometimes I dream of you... And then I wake up.  And you are gone.  It's not enough .

I have to say that my latest literary choices have not quite lived up to expectations.  I trudged through Franzen's Freedom only to be relatively disappointed in the result.  Then, at the recommendation of many, I jumped head first into Joan Didion's memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion is an accomplished writer whose career has offered her the opportunity to turn her recall of the grief process into another job opportunity. The book won the National Book Award so it certainly seemed like a safe bet.   After almost 40 years of marriage to her husband ( John Gregory Dunne , a similarly accomplished writer), Didion finds herself widowed when her husband collapses from a suddent heart attack. To add complications to her grief, Joan's adult daughter, Quintana, is hospitalized with a life threatening septic infection at the time of her husband's death and she continues to deal with Quintana's recovery and relapse throughout the course of the book.   On th

    Photo taken March 20, 2011 What season are we in? Has anyone invented a solar powered leaf vacuum yet? I need one.   Anybody got a match?

Tonight is the Series Finale of Big Love .  Since I don't have HBO, I will have to wait for the DVDs to see the finale myself. I became a fan of the show after hearing the series' creators discuss it on the NPR show Fresh Air in 2007.  I'm currently halfway through season 4.   Personally, I think Big Love is one of the most underrated series on television.  If you've never watched, the premise is that Bill Henrickson (played by Bill Paxton) is a Mormon in Utah who was raised at a fictional polygamist compound called Juniper Creek. At the tender age of 18, he is cast out of the compound (as all boys are) and starts a new life, intending to rid himself of the questionable ethics he found in his upbringing within the cult at Juniper Creek.  He finds success running a chain of home improvement stores and somehow, through a series of life-changing events, finds himself living a polygamist lifestyle, married to three women as he practices what the LDS church calls "The

This blog post is way overdue. It's been a long week. I've wanted to write since Tuesday but one thing after another seemed to get in the way. Such is life.  Here I am. We are not sure why, but both Roger and I have had our emotions amped up over the last week or two. I feel like our grief has entered a new phase. I don't know the "official" name for this part of grief. Maybe some psychologist could give it a title. There are the little things that cause the leaks . The reminders of her presence. The reminders of her absence. I think that may be part of it but it's not the whole story. Fifteen months into losing Charlotte and our lives are different in so many ways. I have a new job. We busy ourselves with our work. We make some time to relax. The house can seem so quiet sometimes. Painfully quiet. We have also busied ourselves with endeavors that bring those memories closer to the surface. Roger has been hard at work on an original piece of music

It was time for some spring cleaning. I went through the closet and the dresser drawers for the semi-annual purge.  First of all, I need to explain that while I am a person who compulsively craves order, I also seem to find it difficult to put my laundry away immediately after it's folded and done.  For some reason, getting the contents of the basket back into the dresser drawers or onto the shelves seems to require an act of Congress (or, really, the necessity of using of the laundry basket when it's time to do another load).  For some reason that I cannot explain with rational logic, I seem to have a similar problem putting clean clothes away immediately after I wear them.  It seems that while I don't mind cleaning and I certainly like organization, I find an intense amount of satisfaction from making something really, really messy and/or cluttered and THEN finally cleaning it all up.  Does anyone else have this problem or is it just me? So I spent my Saturday morni

This week's musings are of a religious nature...inspired by current events. First, this week Pope Benedict made an official declaration that "the Jews were not responsible for killing Jesus."  First of all, I thought we resolved this in 1965 during Vatican II , ( The Sequel: This Time, it's Holier Than Thou) so I'm not really sure why the announcement is "news".  I know that the announcement coincided with the release of the Pope's latest soon to be best-seller Jesus of Nazareth, Part II (Seriously.  Everyone's got to publish these days.) but the more I thought about this bit of news the more it puzzled me.  As Christians, we believe that Jesus came to Earth as God in human form.  Aside from his short but amazing ministry, his primary purpose was to die for the sins of the world.  His death and subsequent resurrection is the tangible symbol of God's everlasting Grace.  Yes, his death was incredibly violent.  Crucifixion is a horrible and t